Madden NFL - title

Earlier this month, I posted a suggestion for hiding player ratings until the player has played enough games to reveal them. Afterwards, I posted a list of my suggestions for offense, defense, and special teams for Madden 18. That still leaves some other outstanding areas of improvement such as Franchise mode, and I'd like to spend this post focusing there.

Let's start out by going over some of the things that are left over from last year's wishlist:

A lot of these items are related to Franchise, and so keep them in mind as you read through this post. But before I jump into franchise suggestions, let's first look at the issue of the Accelerated clock as it has been implemented in Madden for years:

Accelerated clock, two-minute drill, and CPU timeouts

I've brought this up before, but clock management really needs to be addressed. The accelerated clock should never be disabled! Not in the two-minute drill; not ever. The two minute drill is when it is most important to enforce the accelerated clock because otherwise it completely breaks the two-minute drill. The CPU is particularly bad at exploiting this. I regularly see the CPU go into a huddle and break it within 5 seconds of game clock, which is faster than if they had tried a hurry-up, and which spares them from using a timeout. Human users can exploit this same tactic as well in order to avoid the time it takes to run up to the line. All you have to do is quickly select any pass play then audible or hot route your receivers.

Madden 17 - clock exploits
Breaking a 2-minute drill huddle with 35 seconds on the play clock while
the game clock is running completely breaks the 2-minute drill.

And speaking of CPU timeouts: the CPU should actually use them. There should be some logic in place where if a CPU QB either can't figure out the pre-snap coverage, or he doesn't like the pre-snap coverage, then he should call a timeout to mulligan the play. This should happen if the defense puts eight men in the box when an inside run was called, or if the CPU QB reads press coverage on a wide receiver screen, or other such situations in which the the CPU determines that the player's play is likely to trump their play call. This should be tied to a QB's Awareness and/or Play Recognition rating, and there could maybe also be a small chance that if the QB doesn't make the right read, then the coach can call a timeout instead. CPU defenses should similarly be able to burn a timeout if they read a particularly unfavorable personnel match-up.

Another improvement that could be made to the accelerated clock is to add some variability to it...

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Madden 17 - Training not ready
If you get this error message, then training will stop working completely, and will just hang on an infinite load screen.

Is your Madden 17 franchise getting hung up on an annoying bug that prevents you from doing weekly training? Are you getting a dialogue saying "Training is not ready. Ensure that you have focus players selected."? I had this happen to me, and the resolution is not immediately obvious. I searched the EA troubleshooting forums and Reddit and only found partial solutions that didn't work for me. Apparently, this "glitch" has a couple different causes.

Most of the solutions that I had read online involved adjusting the user team's depth chart. In some cases, users said that the problem was caused by not having enough active players in a specific roster position. By signing a player at the necessary position, the problem was resolved, But this fix wasn't applicable to all users. I specifically encountered this bug in week four of my franchise's preseason. It happened right after installing the 1.04 update, and I feared that the update had hosed my save file. Fortunately, I found a resolution.

First, I tested the fix suggested above by ensuring that I had players at all roster positions and that all depth chart positions were filled, but didn't have immediate success. After a little bit of extra troubleshooting, I found that it was because I had too many players on my active roster. I had signed an extra player to replace an injured player. The injury was only for 3 weeks, so wasn't worth putting the guy on IR, but the new player put me over the roster cap. Since it was preseason, the game apparently doesn't enforce a roster limit, but I noticed that the Week 4 activities included "Cut 11 players". Usually in week 4, you're only supposed to cut 10 players. So I cut some dead weight (so that the activity now says "cut 10 players") and the training loaded...

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NCAA Football

I recently wrote about the ongoing lawsuit between Ed O'Bannon and the NCAA regarding player likenesses for college athletes (and compensation for college athletes in general). While it seems unlikely that any college football games will be made using the NCAA license while this lawsuit remains unresolved in appeal limbo, it does seem inevitable to me that EA will eventually start making these games again. Hopefully, it will come with the ability to include real player likenesses, but that is likely to depend on the outcome of any appeals and the willingness of the NCAA to include real player likenesses in games. Video game sales seems far too lucrative an exploit for the NCAA to pass up, so I highly doubt that they'd simply refuse to grant their license.

Operating under the assumption that EA will go back to making NCAA Football games within the next few years (hopefully as early as NCAA Football 18), I'd like to start talking about the kinds of things that I'd like to see in such games.

NCAA Football 14 -
It's been three years without a college football game. It doesn't look like we'll be getting one for 2016 either.
But hopefully a new entry in the series is only a year or two away...

Legacy features that must return!

I don't expect all the old features to return, and even the ones that do return might not be the same as in the older games. But here's the things that I think the game should absolutely have in some form or another (hopefully similar to previous games):

  • In-season recruiting in dynasty
  • Redshirt players
  • Export draft class to Madden
  • Conference re-alignments
  • EA Locker: Roster sharing & Team Builder
  • Custom stadium sounds
  • "Toughest places to play"

Roster-sharing might seem unnecessary if the result of the lawsuits means that EA can actually license the rights to player likenesses. But it's unclear how that would work. There is no college football labor union (equivalent of the NFL Players' Association) that I'm aware of, so either the NCAA would have the rights to license all of its players as a collective, or it would be the responsibility of the game-maker to individually license each and every player. Hopefully, it's the former. But if it's the latter, that leaves open the possibility of individual players refusing to grant rights to their likenesses, which means they won't be included in the game. Would EA simply remove them from the roster? Or replace them with some generic player? Or go back to using "QB #10" as that player's name? Worse yet, would the game-maker even bother to approach all the athletes, or would they just settle for the key players from elite schools?

In any case, college football rosters are often in flux right up to the start of the season, and many teams need a few games before they settle on a final depth chart. So the ability to share roster updates means that the user base can keep the rosters up to date if EA uses outdated rosters.

Hand-me-downs from Madden

Madden is now a few years ahead of NCAA Football, and the past few years have actually seen a decent improvement in the quality and depth of the game. Of course, I'd like to see a lot of features from recent Madden games also get imported into any future NCAA Football games:

  • Tackling / physics engine
  • Improved running, receiving, QB throw-placement, and defensive play
  • Player experience and confidence (needs to be much more volatile though)
  • Skills Trainer, augmented with college concepts such as the option
  • Stadium upgrades and renovation

Just please, for goodness sake, don't force another Ultimate Team gimmick down our throats!...

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One of the biggest side effects of EA's insistence of releasing its NCAA Football games more than a month ahead of the start of the season is that its rosters tend to be out of date. First off, no real names can be used due to NCAA rules, but EA provides a handy roster-share feature that allows fans to upload named rosters to share with other players. I usually get my roster from Operation Sports. But the great guys at Operation Sports can only do so much. Updating the rosters for big-name schools like Alabama, Florida, and LSU is pretty easy. The little schools are a bit more of a problem. So I've taken it upon myself to make some corrections to Operation Sports' rosters for my alma mater, UNLV.

UNLV Running Rebels logo

First and foremost, I went through each position and made sure that the players listed match what is on the most up-to-date versions of the team's depth chart and roster. This required moving a few players around, since they've changed positions. Other players were renamed and completely revised since those players have since left the team. I also took the liberty of making spelling corrections on some players' names (such as Maika Mataele and Ron Scoggins), updating redshirt statuses that were incorrect, updating the High School and Home State of most players (using the names of the closest town whenever I couldn't find a match), and also updating the faces and equipment of starters.

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NCAA Football 12 box art

Table of Contents

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Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on. Feel free to read more about the blog.

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